A couple of  techniques that work with all selection tools, once you know that:

• You can save your current selection (Select/Save to channel)
  
• Channels can operate on the current selection: bluntly replace it, but also be added, subtracted, intersected with it
  
• Channels appear in the "Channels" dialog   (Windows/Dockable Dialogs/Channels)
  

• Do some selection
  
• Save selection to channel
  
• Start new selection part in "addition"/"subtraction"/"intersection" mode, with some possible overlap with current selection (shift-click, usually, but for scissors you have to "shift-enter" at the end (instead of plain "enter"))
  
• Save the new selection to a channel (and keep the old one)
  
• Etc...
  

• Do some selection
  
• Save selection to channel
  
• Repeat (with some overlap most of the time)
  
• Once done, use the Channels dialog to add/subtract/intersect the channels to the current selection
  

• Since you spent so much time doing these selections, save the final selection, too. May come in handy.
  
• As long as you save the image with as XCF, the selections that you saved as channels are saved with it. You can interrupt your work... or at least do periodic and useful saves of the image.
  
• Nothing says you have to use the same selection tool all along... you can use the best tool for each partial selection.
  

A quick script to automate the background erasure when the background is uniform.

To use:

• Make a selection on the background using the fuzzy selector with a threshold big enough to include small irregularities
  
• Use Layer>Erase background
  

• Most of the background is completely deleted and is guaranteed to be totally transparent (thanks Blighty)
  
• The color used for color-to-alpha is deduced from the erase background color, and so doesn't ned to be specified.
  

For Beginners to Gimp, a look at the selection tools and briefly how they work.

To keep these demonstration videos to a sensible length, the subject is split into three parts.

Do not like videos? then the Gimp manual references are

Chapter 14 starting https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tools-selection.html
Chapter 7 starting https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-selections.html

1. The various selection tools, plenty of them, rectangle, elliptical, free-select, fuzzy, color, scissors, foreground and quickmask.





2. Modifying a selection with the selection modes and Selection Menu options.




3. Selections and the transform tools: move, rotate, scale...etc.

Has any of you guys figured out how to use the various G'MIC Impaint filters ?

I dont do much photo manipulation but content aware filling is something i need to use from time to time but i find it hard to use it properly.
Most of the time i end up using 'Heal Selection' (resynthesizer) instead.

David Tschumperle seems to be unwilling to answer questions as to what the individual sliders do and that Pat David tutorial didnt help much either.
Changing the sliders without knowing what im doing, doesnt work very well, and the preview is inaccurate anyway, so experimenting with the filter is time consuming and frustrating.

The idea for this thread comes from a conversation with CRogers on G+ and a script package from deviantart.
Somebody was asking when we finally gonna get non destructive adjustment layers as in Photoshop, and i remembered the deviantart script pack which is basically a memory aid for people who dont understand layermodes.

So here are some tricks how to imitate adjustment layers for non destructive image manipulation:

Saturation Adjustment:
create a new black layer on top of your (color) image and set the Mode to 'Color' (you will get a b/w image).

Inversion Adjustment:
create a new white layer on top of your image and set the Mode to 'Difference' (you will get a negative)

Sharpening Adjustment:
get RobA's HighPass Filter script (registry.gimp.org/node/7385), run it on your image and set the new layer to 'Grain Merge' or 'Hard Light' (this will sharpen your image)

Adjust Lights, Darks or Mids:
use this tutorial (clownfishcafe.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/color-pop-on-midtone-grayscale.html) to manipulate specific value parts of an image with a layermask.


Any more non destructive tweaking tricks ??

Alexa ranks us at 10,964,287. GimpForums.com was around 100K, so we just have to pass a bit over 10 million other sites.

I have a company logo that I want to use in an SVG icon file. The logo is a symbol followed by the company name.

I just want the symbol. I found how to clip it, but this is just masking stuff, the SVG still contains all the useless paths for the company name (and some software doesn't really pay attention to these masked off paths).

So, how can I remove all these extra paths?

There is an updated Gimp 2.10 method here: https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-Cut-Ou...6#pid37576 Recommend going there first

Cut-out text comes up frequently. Want something like this
   
or this
   

It is the same process using a layer mask.

Aimed at beginners, demonstrating
- resize a layer
- a quick look at how a layer mask works
- using alpha-to-selection to select text shapes
- put the selection straight into a layer mask

No 30 minute epics here: only 5 minute video

(10-23-2016, 04:42 PM)Yash Pal Wrote: I was on 'GIMP Forums' which seems to have shut down. There were: Ofnuts, Rich 2005, Fluffy Bunny and a few others. I used to read the threads (posted by others)  and have learnt a lot from the replies to the threads. I hope to learn a lot by following your replies to the threads.

I copied and pasted a part of an image in the same image, after extending the canvas size to accommodate the pasted part - the background of the image was made transparent. The pasted image is not visible, though the marching ants of the selection are seen. I changed the background to white, (new layer - white; and put the white layer below the existing layer, but still the pasted layer cannot be seen (not visible).

I am making some mistake but do not know it. Can someone please tell me how to make the pasted layer visible?

OS: Ubuntu 14.04; GIMP: The version available in Ubuntu Software Centre (2.8.18)

 I had asked this question in another forum; so far, there is no reply.